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Ah, the ebb and flow of blogging. When nothing happens, there’s nothing to tell. When stuff happens, there’s no time to recount it. (Really, that’s just an excuse for laziness. But who’s counting?)

Anyway. A lot has gone on over the last two weeks, in books news and non-books news. But more important than the narrative itself is the takeaway—so here we go, so that one day I can point to lessons learned between July 30 and August 9.

-Thrillers are good but leave me feeling empty.
Last Friday, my dear friend Laura visited me for lunch near Wall Street. She had just come from a tour of a publisher, and is swimming in books (hm that phrase makes me think of a “swimming book”–name the poem!). Which is good for me, since I get the excess. She came bearing Michael Connelly’s latest thriller, The Scarecrow.

The Scarecrow

I wasn’t sure what to think of it, until I read the jacket copy, which read:

Jack McEvoy is at the end of the line as a crime reporter. Forced to take a buy-out from the Los Angeles Times as the newspaper grapples with dwindling revenues, he’s got only a few days left on the job. His last assignment? Training his replacement, a low-cost reporter just out of journalism school. But Jack has other plans for his exit. He is going to go out with a bang — a final story that will win the newspaper

Given my exposure to that type of reporting this summer, how could I not read it? So I took a break from my regular reading to devour this piece of whatever it is. It sucked me in immediately, and gripped me so hard I was afraid my hands were glued to it at a point.

(On a related note, The Red and the Black is still going, but slowly. I don’t know why! It’s so good and I love it but I just can’t make a huge dent. And I feel like I’m sinking a lot of time into it. And it doesn’t feel slow. But I just don’t read that much at a time. Well, the font is small…)

-Mayors sometimes wear interesting outfits.
Last Sunday, I was assigned to follow the Mayor in his press van. First to the Ecuador parade in Elmhurst, then to a Q&A at the beginning of the Pakistan parade. I got my question in, but not before multiple chants of “viva Ecuador:”

El Gaucho Alcalde?

-Murderers don’t necessarily live in sketchy-looking homes

On Monday, I was assigned to pay a visit to the Bronx home of the woman convicted of killing a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor. I would talk to her neighbors, landlord, etc. To be honest, I was initially a bit nervous. But that just proves how silly were my preconceived notions of where a convicted murderer would live:

Bronx home on a nice, quiet block.

-Ground Zero is still just that.

Turns out the Freedom Tower plans are delayed, so I went to find out how people were feeling about it.
This is what I saw:

There is obviously a lot of progress here, but it must be painful for many people to see.

-I am not the best at navigating Queens.

Enrollment in CUNY summer school is up, and I was sent to Queensborough Community College to help find out why. Sounds like fun. I like college students. You know. But it took me so long to get there. I only found the campus thanks to the help of Angela, a lovely woman I met on the bus who is working as an exotic dancer to make ends meet (that’s why she’s going back to school). Afterwards, I didn’t get back to the office before my shift ended. Anyway, this is important to know because my town is on the border of Queens … yikes.

-Mozart is awesome.

Okay, so I already knew that. But a trip to Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival (which, fractionally, was not mostly Mozart) caused me to go through all the concertos, sonatas, operas, and symphonies on my iPod. I have fallen in love with the music again, and have a weird desire to see Amadeus.
Thanks Dan!

Eagerly anticipating Mozart.

–Never go Greyhound.

I’m not going into detail here. But I was misguided and will never repeat the error. YIKES!

-Washington D.C. is a city replete with pretty streets and nice people

I went to DC this weekend to chill with pals and pols. After hopping off the Greyhound on Thursday, I arrived at my lovely friend (and generous three-night host) Leora’s gorgeous apartment. Over the weekend, I met her friends, who have awesome, exciting jobs in all sorts of governmental and non-governmental offices. So there is life outside New York … hrmmmm.

Also, the Metro is a lot cleaner. And a view like this is within walking distance:

It was all prettiness.

(Also, it’s fun to be wandering aimlessly and end up here:)

Love from Josh and Toby. Yes, I went there.

-Agriculture is alive and well in our capital.

So much so, in fact, that the Department of Agriculture has a farmers market! I found this out because the Metro stop for the Smithsonian, which I visited with Betsy on Friday, dumps you in front of the Dept. of Agriculture building. (Also, I didn’t hear the barista clearly when she asked if I wanted the libido-enhanced coffee, so it took an explanation of “it will increase blood pressure for you and your partner” before I declined.)

But outside of the Dept of A itself, we stumbled onto the National Botanic Garden. It was beautiful, and I never would have thought to pay it a visit had I not walked straight into it. I think this fine establishment is what makes this part of the mall so pretty:

Flowers!

-Hunger strikes don’t only happen at Columbia

This display of solidarity for Iran made me feel at home:

Striking for Iran.

-Not all art museums are created equal.

I found the Smithsonian’s Renwick, the American art museum, and was disappointed by the collection. I’m not an art snob, but I’m used to the Met. I was in and out of there in half an hour. At least it was free. Here is what I found interesting:

Hmmm.

So then I found my way to the Corcoran Gallery, a collection that outgrew the Renwick (and costs $8.00 for students). There was more to look at, a nice photo exhibit, and some cool sculptures:

legit gauchos this time.

So I learned a lot. All this learning is making me tired, so I should probably sleep now. I have to be at work an hour early tomorrow.

But that Kindle article did have a few good things to say about iPhone reading, which led me to discover this beaut: Eucalyptus is an application that gives you unfettered access to books that are publicly available via the Guttenberg Project. It is lovely. I left my books at home, and on the train today, started F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories Flappers and Philosophers. I was able to read the first one between two subway rides. The tale was absolutely charming, and the language, of course, amazing.

More importantly, the experience of reading on the iPhone was pleasurable. The brilliance lies in its simplicity: instead of having a fancy technology to imitate the way letters fall out on a page, it simply uses scans of pages. So it really looks like a book. And the tiny pages have numbers, and you can actually turn them by swiping your finger across the screen n a motion that causes the effects of a normal page turn. I’m really happy with this. Obviously, nothing is better than ink and paper, but as for reading off a screen, this experience is great. (But it means I’m in the middle of one more book and thus progressing at a 1/4 slower speed. But I’m sticking to my guns anyway–slow reading is better reading).

Whew. I am so exhausted after today’s fast. And I was exhausted to begin with from a long, rainy work day yesterday, trying to figure out what happened to the poor engineer who was hit by a huge branch in Central park. It’s simply tragic. Today, the News reported that his mother said he’s improving slowly, so that’s good. My best wishes to Sasha and his family.

But in a single day of reporting on a Bronx church’s street carnival, I can think of six people off the top of my head who said something like, “you’re too young to be doing this” (and I responded likewise to a 77-year-old about his vocation). Today was not the first day I’d heard this, but it was the day I received the highest frequency of variations of the comment so far. Who inquired? A carnival organizer; a cop sergeant; a parent; a ferris wheel mechanic (who guessed I was 16!); a parishioner—just to name a few.

I’m more curious than annoyed by this, but it’s getting a bit old. I don’t like having to explain myself away. I try to make the best of it by making a joke that lightens up sources and makes them comfortable. But it gets awkward! Like: you’re too young to be reporting. What are you doing here? Why are you here? Who are you, even? Go back to school.

And I don’t think actually being young is necessarily a bad thing (aside from having less experience, of course). Though the perceptions that youth carries can be exhausting on the job.

Also, guess who showed up at the carnival?

It's Archbishop Dolan! A celebrity for the parishioners.

New York’s newest Vatican celeb visited a church’s street festival to lift their spirits after a roller coaster car was derailed on Saturday night, and 11 ended up hospitalized with minor injuries.

Also, I have a confession to make: I am sort of addicted to True Blood. And in tonight’s episode, I found myself deciphering plot points based on Euripides, which I learned in my first-year English course. From the Bacchae to True Blood—that is full circle.

Anyway. Still in the middle of The Red and the Black; in the beginning of Hamlet in Purgatory; and, as of yesterday, started Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. If only I had an entire summer slated for just reading. A girl can dream.

The best part about work: every day is different. Unlike many of my friends, I am not confined to an office (and when I am in the office, it’s pretty damn exciting).

Today I went to Coney Island again:

Stillwell Ave. Subway Stop

But this time, there was no beach. Instead, I got to hang out with these guys:

Check out those trunks!

I worked on a followup to a story about a PETA video that showed circus elephant abuse. Many interesting conversations. And the whole circus setting brought me back to a book I read and enjoyed awhile ago, Water for Elephants. I also had a bit of an adventure being chased out of the performers’ parking lot by security guards wielding handguns.

But more about the animals themselves: elephants are actually surprisingly elegant up close. They unfurl their trunks one notch at a time, in a fluid motion that echoes the movement of an octopus. The equanimical creatures stand together, sharing a bowl of carrots, their ultra-flexible trunks doing loop-the-loops around each other. Sort of hypnotic. And beautiful—especially when they use all that power to grasp a single blade of hay.

when you have something you urgently need to do, but you just stall and stall and stall? Not because the task itself is so hard, but because you’ve stalled a bit because of laziness—and after that first bit, you’re done. Fallen off the cliff of procrastination. Because from here, the edge, this thing to do looms so large overhead that it feels far more daunting than it should be. There is nothing wrong, or overly taxing about this task. But you’ve pushed it off and it suddenly seems impossible. Then you push it off some more. It still needs to be done. But. You just can’t get going. Sitting with a computer, you keep doing other things and avoid opening the document–at all costs. Because after a certain point, that discomfort of having pushed something off (perhaps that stems from the notion that, hey, why would I push something off if it were not bad to begin with?) seems like a failure in itself. So what’s the point?

Today I finished On Beauty. I’m not quite sure how to feel about it: the book read well, smoothly, quickly. The characters are rich and real. Plus, Smith built them with individual ticking time bombs. She explodes them each deliciously, one bang at a time, with bursts of incendiary dialogue. And, from a personal perspective, I enjoyed the university setting. Debates over free speech, culture, and long faculty meetings are the stuff of the Spectator. I enjoyed reading about a lecture from the tenure hopeful’s perspective. So the topic, broadly speaking, was familiar to me. Moreover, certain passages are undeniably beautiful, witty, and provocative. Her grip on language—unbelievable:

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

Brilliant. I wish I had thought of that. And:

A sprawling North London parkland … that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in the autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions …

However: On Beauty is an incredibly apt title, since the book is only that: on beauty. Beneath the beauty of well-crafted prose, humor, structure, and character development—which glow divinely under Smith’s deft hand—the book seems to have no soul. I’m not sure why I feel this, because I think that any art that aims to teach a single lesson is definitively bad art. (Singularity is a copout to many important principles, and rules out humanity. etc etc blather blather). But this work needs something more central, an anchor. I get that the book is about culture wars, but that seems tangential to a family disintegration/soap opera-ish plot that is masked by a deep university setting. I think this project would have worked better as clearly demarcated vignettes that showcase the writing and character. But the way it is, subplots seem to circle into a meaningful pot of nothing muchness.

Disclaimer: I have not read Forster’s Howard’s End, on whose structure Smith based On Beauty, and am thus missing an important analytical perspective. Maybe I’d find the soul if I read it as an adaptation as a familiar classic—but I shouldn’t have to. So overall, the book is mediocre, though entirely impressive from a 25-year-old! 25! To think, I’m turning that age in five years. Way to make me feel inadequate, Zadie.

Anyway. Starting Hamlet in Purgatory, plodding along in the astounding The Red and the Black. Work sent me to an amusing press conference today. My failure to teach myself web design is sort of depressing. There are many things I need to do but am not doing. This is summer, and I don’t want it to end.

Hello

and welcome to my world of words. I'm Joy, a 21-year-old reporter at the Forward and sometimes I write elsewhere. I use this blog to post random thoughts on post-college life, New York, interesting articles, education, and, of course, books. I tweet too.